News

Area residents battle high winds

Gusts of up to 84 mph send Erie trampoline flying

By Kimberli Turner Colorado Hometown Weekly

Posted:
01/20/2012 09:52:49 AM MST

Madison Hughes, 8, holds a metal stake that once held her trampoline in place in the backyard. Her mother Barbara Hughes found the trampoline in her neighbors' backyard after high winds sent it there Thursday, Jan. 19. (Kimberli Turner/Colorado Hometown Weekly)

Erie resident Barbara Hughes had been meaning to introduce herself to new neighbors Jane and Gene Bennett after they moved to the Vista Pointe neighborhood a few months ago -- and Hughes finally took the opportunity when she found her mangled trampoline in their backyard Thursday, Jan. 19.

Wind gusts of up to 84 mph Thursday night and early this morning ripped through Boulder County and kept waking Hughes and her 8-year-old daughter Madison.

Hughes thinks the trampoline, which sat in their backyard behind a low wooden fence at 1441 Lawson Avenue for about a year, was blown into the Bennetts' backyard sometime early Thursday morning.

"I woke up at 3 a.m. and (the trampoline) was still here," Hughes said. "When I got up at 6:30, it was gone."

Hughes said that when she realized the trampoline -- which was a gift for Madison on her seventh birthday -- had blown away, she hesitated telling her children.

"I didn't want them to be sad all day but I said, 'Kids, there's something missing out there,'" she said.

Madison said she and her brother Michael, 10, were mostly surprised when her mother told them.

"I said, 'Where did it go?'" she said.

Madison was afraid to go to school with all the wind and Hughes told her children to "hit the ground" if anything went flying through the air during recess at Black Rock Elementary.

Hughes was determined to find the trampoline and, after taking a walk around the neighborhood and through the open space that sits between the Erie Landfill and the Bennetts' home, she spotted it on its side in their backyard.

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Hughes said she knocked on their door to tell them the news at about noon, Thursday, and was apprehensive about their reaction.

"I didn't even know it was back there," Jane Bennett said. "How it got from there to here, I have no idea."

Hughes suspects the trampoline blew over her fence, up the street and over the Bennett's side gate because she found a couple stakes -- that once held the trampoline in place -- in the yard between her house and the Bennetts'.

Bennett and her husband moved to Erie in October from Buela southwest of Pueblo, and Thursday's incident made for a memorable meeting between neighbors.

"She knocked on the door and said the trampoline was in the backyard. I said, 'Oh really? I always wanted one for my granddaughter," Bennett said.

But Madison was glad to have her birthday gift back -- or almost back.

"I went to a friend's house and then I came home and (my mom) said, 'I found the trampoline,' and I ran over here (to see it)," Madison said.

Hughes said that across from her home a panel of her neighbors' privacy fence was blown down and so was a tree in Pirate Park about a block down the street.

But, by nightfall Thursday, both had been put back in their place and the only evidence of the gusts was the trampoline, its netting ripped up.

Hughes' and her family have plans to take the trampoline apart this weekend -- its metal base already dismantled in places from the wind -- and hope to salvage it. If they can, Hughes -- who said she hasn't seen winds like this in the five years she's lived in Erie -- said she plans to place sandbags on the frame along with the metal stakes.

"The wind was so horrendous. It was a blessing nothing was damaged," Bennett said.

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